The Hudson
Audio room featured Skylan racks and stands which were very attractive and
well-built. The diminutive Omega speakers offered a nice and seductive sound
that belied their size while being driven by Opera Audio electronics.

The Omega
speaker ($399 a pair).

The
Audiokits room featured lots of kits (designed by Erno Borbely), though in this case they were already
finished and ready to be making music. Lots to see and look at, but no music was playing.
I found this a in several rooms at the show—nice room, people milling
around, no music. Too bad as the room looked very promising based on the
designer's reputation.

The Audiokits room with finished amplifiers and preamplifiers—but nice and
quiet.

The Vivaldi room showed off the Lowther based full-range speakers. Very nice
design that looked as good as it sounded. Not quite full-range, but it did
offer a credible sound that was musical and fairly extended for a Lowther
horn based speaker.

Lots of Lowthers to make the music.

Using Doc B.'s new S.E.X. (single ended
experimenter's) kit. The S.E.X. is a stereo integrated single ended triode (SET)
amplifier of 2 watts per channel output.

The BIX turntable from Bottlehead turned more than one head that I know of...
$769 with Rega 2 arm in kit
form. Stunning looks and sonics, say... how you do it for so little scratch?

The Seduction phono-preamplifier. Very seductive... Carol can I have a minute
to myself....

Hey Ronnie... I said a minute! Ronnie Caplan the man.

Colorado Sound and Design showed the classic table from Oracle with a
Tri-Planar arm—way too cool! And they actually were playing music—uh, I
meant LPs!

Colorado Sound and Design used Alon speakers (no sorry I mean Nola
speakers) and in this case they are renamed Vipers. Always enjoyed the sound from Alon's speakers (Nola!!) and this was just as enjoyable as ever.
Electronics
used were either Manley, Cary, or Sophia, with Berendsen digital front-ends.
Cabling was by Soundstring.

The Kharmas doing their thang with Manley amplifiers. This was a bigger room
with three systems in a sort of C-shape. The music sounded quite good and from
the hall, was a drawing force to deal with, with so many rooms to visit.

DejaVu 18 watt stereo amp, push pull design
using Sofia 300bs. The amp is made by Vu from Deja Vu Audio in Virginia and was making pretty good music with
the Kharmas through Soundstring cables.

The new Cruz digital amplifier, and from their site... "Abstract
of this Cruz exclusive patent.
An improved power amplifier having complimentary power transistors connected
in push-pull arrangement, and having a bias voltage source coupled to the
transistors for generating a transverse idling current, flowing through the
complementary pair of transistors. A regulating, feedback control circuit,
has a set point input and inputs connected to precision resistors, connected
to detect the current through the power transistors and the output current.
Analogue arithmetic computing circuits, continuously compute the
instantaneous difference between the detected transverse idling current
through the power transistors and the set point input for the idling
current. The output of the controller circuit is connected to the bias
voltage sources to vary the bias voltage in proportion to the instantaneous
difference between the detected transverse idling current and the set value
of idling current, to maintain a constant, transverse idling current."
Interesting.... but how does it sound? Sorry, static display... though they
had one set up with some Dali Euphonia speakers off to the side, it was
never playing music. Shucks!